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Most readers of Alexander Smith's verses, it may be presumed, have first met with them in the shape of extracts and fragmentary specimens, as quoted piecemeal in the journals and magazines of the day. And, equally it may be presumed, few who have so met with them, have not been attracted to read him in the completeness of his own volume. May it not be yet again presumed, that disappointment on the whole has been the result? In fact, is not this singularly-gifted minstrel more effective by far when heard, as it were, in broken outbursts of song, and fitful gusts of melody, than when fully equipped in his singing-robes he essays to charm and subdue by a sustained effort, by strains of linked sweetness long drawn out?
When Sir Walter Scott wanted a motto for a new chapter, concerning the fate of Ravenswood, or the fortunes of Nigel, rather than be at the trouble of hunting up something suitable from Anderson's British Poets, or Lamb's Dramatic Specimens, he would spin out a web from his own brain, and simply underline the product, "Old Play." These often brilliant bits of fiction, forged for the occasion, as they differ in kind, so perhaps they are sometimes, as far as they go, superior in degree, to the poetry of his duly finished lyrical romances. Now, in Alexander Smith's volume of poems, there are scores upon scores of passages which, isolated and presented motto-wise, might be similarly underlined "Old Play"—and which all but the adept connoisseurs of criticism might really believe to be borrowed from some richly tropical dramatist of Elizabethan days; modernised a little, perchance, but that not much. You might write Shakspeare under a few such passages, and "the general" would not demur, but might simply differ among themselves whether the particular excerpt were from Love's Labour's Lost, or from the Midsummer Night's Dream. As for Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Ford, Webster and Jonson, Middleton and Dekker, Chapman and Shirley, with perfect impunity you might draw on their names to almost any amount—the aforesaid modernisation always provided. An eclectic Dodd's book of "Beauties" would give a not unjust notion of Alexander Smith, although in appraising Shakspeare such a book is "tolerable and not to be endured."
For, it must be owned, the Glasgow[1] poet's conduct of a story—his constructive power, as exhibited in his chief performance—is "stark naught." His "Life-Drama" is neither life-like nor dramatic. The dramatis personæ are hardly to be known one from another, unless by a diligent consultation of the names prefixed to their several rhapsodies. What the plot is, is not to be known at all, by any consultation whatever. All we can gather is, that the hero has been guilty of something distress-
